1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to verifying customer provided financial account information. More specifically, the invention relates to verifying the customer provided financial account information to allow the customer to perform a financial transaction, either immediately or in the future, by requiring the customer to confirm receipt of information, including, for example, verification codes using predetermined actions and/or processes.
2. Description of Related Art
For certain applications, such as online banking applications or automatic bill payment, the customer provides financial account information for performing a financial transaction. This financial account information is provided by a customer before using the application, for example, during registration with an automatic bill payment service. Confirming a customer's financial account information helps to ensure that the customer is the owner of the financial account, reducing the chance of a problem when transferring money to or from the account.
One method of verifying customer provided financial account information is to post two ACH credit transactions to a customer's account. Both credit transactions include identifying the sender of the credit transactions. Each transaction also credits the customer's account for a random amount of funds (e.g. 13 cents and 45 cents). The customer verifies their account by accessing their bank account statement for the financial account, and providing the exact amount of each credit transaction to an account verification system.
We have determined that disadvantages of this method include, that the combination of credit transactions only provides a certain number of unique combinations. If the amount of a credit transaction is limited to amounts between 0.01 and 0.99, two credit transactions results in only about 10000 unique combinations. Another disadvantage is the cost of the credit transactions to the sending party. We have determined that what is needed is a more secure and cost effective way of verifying customer provided financial account information.